Spinnaker Says Third-Party Support Biz Growing at a 30 Percent Clip

November 19, 2013
Alex Woodie

Spinnaker Support, which provides third-party technical support for ERP and CRM systems from Oracle, JD Edwards, and SAP, brought in 34 percent more money during the third quarter of 2013 than it did in Q3 last year, the company announced last month. One of the accounts it landed during the quarter was a big JD Edwards World shop by the name of Cook County.

When it comes to third-party support for ERP applications, there are two main games in town: Spinnaker Support, which is based in the old JD Edwards stomping grounds of Denver, Colorado, and Rimini Street, which is based in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Rimini, which is on its way to going public, is the bigger of the two outfits. When we compared the two firms earlier this spring, Spinnaker had about 170 clients, and Rimini had about 550. But both companies are growing fast, thanks to loads of Oracle and SAP customers who are dissatisfied with the value they get from the big maintenance fees they pay every year.

Specifically, Spinnaker says its third quarter ended September 30 was a good one. In addition to growing revenue 34 percent, it had nearly 110 percent growth in sales bookings compared to 3Q12. Its trailing twelve-month (TTM) metric shows revenue increase of more than 29 percent. It’s increased its revenue over 18 straight quarters, which CEO Matt Stava says is “indicative of the increasing acceptance and maturation of third-party maintenance as an alternative to vendor-supplied maintenance and support services.”

One of the big customers signing up during the third quarter was Cook County, which includes Chicago, Illinois, and the surrounding suburbs. Cook County is the second most populous county in the nation, with nearly 5.5 million people. The county uses JD Edwards World running on IBM i servers to manage its business, and to run payroll for more than 20,000 employees.

Lydia Murray, the CIO of Cook County, says she has a team to handle day-to-day management of the JD Edwards systems, but needed a partner to “solve the really tough problems. No one else doing third-party support for JD Edwards has the ability to meet our specific needs,” she says in a press release.